User:Shadow1/Perlwikipedia

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The correct title of this article is perlwikipedia. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.

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[edit] What is this thing?

I am a Perl hacker. As such, I write virtually all programs I develop in Perl, which includes Shadowbot. When I wrote Shadowbot, I didn't realize I could use the pywikipedia Python framework to automate editing, so I was forced to write a complete Wikipedia-editing script completely in Perl. Lucky me. I've released that code to the public, so that Perl hackers on Wikipedia are no longer forced to use pywikipedia to write bots.

[edit] Does that mean you're trying to make pywikipedia obsolete?

Of course not! Pywikipedia is a valuable bot framework (the Tawkerbot2 code, as well as most major bots, is written using it), however, if Perl coders are confined to using Python, they can't customize and extend the code to fit their needs. With an open-source framework written in their "native language," they'll be able to better write bots in a language that they are comfortable with, and even customize the framework to fit needs it wasn't originally imagined for.

[edit] How complete is perlwikipedia?

Well, perlwikipedia is only as complete as Shadowbot, which is the primary project I code for. However, I've finished code to perform these tasks:

  • Retrieve the wikitext of articles.
  • Retrieve revision ids of articles.
  • Retrieve the history of articles.
  • Revert to old revisions of articles.
  • Warn users.

Yes, I'm aware that these functions are limited to anti-vandal/anti-spam bots. However, if you're a halfway decent Perl hacker (and the code is really simple, since I wrote it ;) ), you should be able to add new functions to the framework.

[edit] Where can I get this?

perlwikipedia version 0.90 can be downloaded from http://atheros.dnsalias.org/perlwikipedia. This is a temporary location until I can find a suitable hosting provider such as SourceForge, Freshmeat, or freepository.

[edit] Why 'perlwikipedia'?

Why 'pywikipedia'?

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